I know this has been brought up before, but I just found out about Gelato,
http://www.nvidia.com/page/gz_home.html, NVidia's
raytracing program that is able to utilize NVidia GPUs for parts of the
rendering process. I was wondering if the same could be done for povray?

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>I know this has been brought up before, but I just found out about Gelato,
> http://www.nvidia.com/page/gz_home.html, NVidia's
> raytracing program that is able to utilize NVidia GPUs for parts of the
> rendering process. I was wondering if the same could be done for povray?

This appears to be at least technically possible, as they claim Gelato
"leverages the NVIDIA GPU as a floating point math processor".
I'm not sure how much reverse engineering it would take.

Gelato provides an API, but it's probably a wrapper for the whole renderer.
From the FAQ - "What rendering functions are run on the GPU?
NVIDIA does not disclose these details, and the answer is always
changing because of advances in both the hardware and the software."

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jhu nous apporta ses lumieres en ce 06/08/2006 11:24:
> I know this has been brought up before, but I just found out about Gelato,
> http://www.nvidia.com/page/gz_home.html, NVidia's
> raytracing program that is able to utilize NVidia GPUs for parts of the
> rendering process. I was wondering if the same could be done for povray?
> 
> 
> 
> 
It can work IF you have a genuine nVidia card. It may not work if your nVidia 
card is a little bit to old. It may not work if you have a third party card 
using the nVidia chip. It will deffinately NOT work if you have any other kind 
of card: ATI, intel, other...

Verdict:
That's not an option for POV-Ray.

-- 
Alain
-------------------------------------------------
Christian Science: Shit happening is all in your mind.

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In article <44d7e9a9$1@news.povray.org>, ele### [at] netscapenet 
says...
> jhu nous apporta ses lumieres en ce 06/08/2006 11:24:
> > I know this has been brought up before, but I just found out about Gela
to,
> > http://www.nvidia.com/page/gz_home.html, NVidia's
> > raytracing program that is able to utilize NVidia GPUs for parts of the
> > rendering process. I was wondering if the same could be done for povray
?
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> It can work IF you have a genuine nVidia card. It may not work if your nV
idia 
> card is a little bit to old. It may not work if you have a third party ca
rd 
> using the nVidia chip. It will deffinately NOT work if you have any other
 kind 
> of card: ATI, intel, other...
> 
> Verdict:
> That's not an option for POV-Ray.
> 
Different insane idea, but sadly with some serious limitations. As of 
this year a company called Rapport has released a chip with 256 cores on 
it. They plan to eventually produce one with 1,000 cores. The 
drawback... To lower energy use they only use 8-bit cores, running at 
100mhz.

But still.... Yikes!!!

-- 
void main () {

    call functional_code()
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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That's just Gelato, which only works on NVidia GPUs. However, take a look at
http://www.gpgpu.org, a repository for general purpose computing on the GPU.
Quite a bit of general purpose computing can be performed on the GPU alone.

OpenGL can be utilized as a general purpose interface to the current crop of
GPUs.  Perhaps parts of Povray can be coded to take advantage of this. The
only problem I can see is that NVidia GPUs use single-precision floating
point and calculations may not be IEEE 754 compliant. On the other hand,
NVidia is somehow able to get around this with their raytracer.

Alain <ele### [at] netscapenet> wrote:

> It can work IF you have a genuine nVidia card. It may not work if your nVidia
> card is a little bit to old. It may not work if you have a third party card
> using the nVidia chip. It will deffinately NOT work if you have any other kind
> of card: ATI, intel, other...
>
> Verdict:
> That's not an option for POV-Ray.
>
> --
> Alain
> -------------------------------------------------
> Christian Science: Shit happening is all in your mind.

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> That's just Gelato, which only works on NVidia GPUs. However, take
> a look at http://www.gpgpu.org, a repository for general purpose
> computing on the GPU. Quite a bit of general purpose computing can
> be performed on the GPU alone.
>
> OpenGL can be utilized as a general purpose interface to the
> current crop of GPUs.  Perhaps parts of Povray can be coded to take
> advantage of this. The only problem I can see is that NVidia GPUs
> use single-precision floating point and calculations may not be
> IEEE 754 compliant. On the other hand, NVidia is somehow able to
> get around this with their raytracer.

In the link you posted there is a paper that explains how to emulate higher 
precision floats...

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Indeed there is. However, they describe 44-bit floating point emulation.
It'd be nice to see if someone can come up with a 64-bit implementation and
how performance compares with a CPU.

-John

"scott" <spa### [at] spamcom> wrote:
>
> In the link you posted there is a paper that explains how to emulate higher
> precision floats...

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